Find your passion.

We are lucky enough to live in a time where we no longer need to just ‘get a job’ and show up each day to work in a factory, eat our lunch, go home and start the process all over again.

No. Not us. We are likely to be the first generation to quite literally have the world at our fingertips. I heard an interesting fact (or seemingly factual statement made by someone who seemed rather convincing) that most middle-class westerners live better than some Kings did a good couple of years ago. This is beside the point but just let that little nugget sink in for a minute.

The problem with finding your passion.

As a “millennial” I have been told that it is really important to find my purpose, my passion, my calling in life. I have been told that there is an ‘oceanic’ universe-halting moment that I will experience when I find that one thing I was destined to do with my life. Now, if you are like me, there was not one person who took the time to sit me down and tell me these ‘truths’. Instead, it is something that I have picked up in the most subtle way through (mainly) digital media; things like advertising, movies, magazine ads, and even story books.

Social Media? Well now. Social media is in a class of its own. We have gotten so used to constantly being distracted that each moment we have, where we are not doing something, we return like moths to a flame to the blue glow of our smartphones. We fill ourselves with others stories, others that are all doing so ‘well’, but I digress.

Truth be told, I think I have bought into this “finding your passion” thing for most of my life. Until one day, I realized that this searching for my place in the universe actually had the opposite effect on me and that was a sort of overwhelmed procrastination. I would often find myself, over-thinking ideas, turning away opportunities that I tried for some time but just wasn’t “feeling it” and overall just having a feeling of uncertainty and overwhelmingness that would just leave me, stalling. Doing nothing. Not trying or trying to little.

I should have put a disclaimer out earlier but these ideas are my own and I do not mean to put down any self-improvement endeavors or dreamers out there who want to aspire to do great things.

This blog post is more of an “Ah-Ha” moment for me, where I discovered that in order to actually find my passion is to stop searching for it. By doing so, the pressure of finding this mythical experience becomes much, much less and it allows me to take action and try things. Stick opportunities out a bit longer and put some effort in, even when I am not “feeling it”.

Maybe you are like me, maybe not. Whether you have all your ducks in a row or are still figuring things out. I want to encourage you to just do something. If we continue to do, we will continue to progress, when we progress in something, we get better in that area and enjoy it more. I am paraphrasing here, but these are some (similar) words from Mark Cuban.

So here is to us. Let us take action and do things and by doing, find things that make us happy. Love the journey, not the destination.